The God Machine (41 page)

They climbed the stairs into the vault and swept through the entrance to an elevator at the rear of the hall. The main storage rooms were deep underground.
When they got to the viewing chamber, Maggie explained the procedure.

Only one document could be examined at a time. No photographs could be taken. If a copy was being made, the researcher was strongly urged to transcribe in pencil. At no time could any documents be marked or highlighted in any way. The list went on and on.

It was almost one o'clock by the time they sat in the climate-controlled viewing room, at a long vinyl desk, and watched apprehensively as Maggie returned with a great plastic box in her arms.

She placed it gently on the table, then stepped back. “I'm afraid I have to stay here while you examine the artifacts.”

“Of course,” Sajan said with a smile. Maggie sat down at the end of the table.

Koster had already reached into the box. He made straight for the little brown notepad, ignoring the watch and the baseball cards and the other objects within. With great care, he lifted the cover. He flipped through the pages. It was as Maggie had said. The first few yellowed sheets were filled with scores from various card and board games, mostly Parcheesi. It seemed that Thomas Edison didn't let his children win, at least not very often. Then there were several blank pages. Sajan moved in beside him. Koster flipped through the pages and a ribbon of letters appeared out of nowhere, three lines of letters, followed by a blank line, and then three lines of letters again.

Koster sat motionless. It was Ben Franklin's code. The one based on his magic squares.

Koster looked up at Sajan, who flashed him a smile. There were pages and pages in code. Koster turned to the rear of the notepad. Several sheets had been folded together and glued to the spine. He opened them carefully and Sajan caught her breath. Another schematic.
Another piece of the map, or whatever it was. Like Franklin's, but different. An obvious extension, with a similar jumble of circles and squares. Koster flipped back to the pages in code. Then he glanced up at Sajan and the curator's assistant. “This will take a few minutes,” he said.

I
N THE END, IT TOOK
K
OSTER MORE THAN AN HOUR TO
translate the pages. Sajan sat with Maggie, chatting about Edison and what it was like to work for the National Park Service. When he had finished copying the text and the Edison schematic—by pencil—into his notebook, Koster put Theodore's notepad back into the clear plastic box. He waited for Maggie to gather the materials and leave the viewing room before turning to Savita beside him. She could hardly contain herself.

“What's it say?” she inquired, as she reached for his notebook.

Koster pulled it away. He started to read,
“‘The mad Serb came to me this afternoon and showed me a strange illustration—’”

“‘The mad Serb’?”

“He's talking about Nikola Tesla. Apparently Tesla worked for Edison for a time.”

“I know Tesla,” Sajan said. “He invented the radio.”

“I thought Marconi did that.”

“No, it was Tesla. What else does it say?”

“Theodore's notepad states Tesla showed Edison a schematic based on a drawing developed by Benjamin Franklin and others before him. It says Tesla created his own illustration, a fourth schematic, extending the diagram from the Gospel of Judas, da Vinci and Franklin. The illustration came to Tesla in a dream. Tesla believed it was a template for some kind of electrical device that would generate what he called the
phi
frequency, which—and I quote—would
‘open a doorway and put you in direct contact with the Monad.’”

“The Monad or demiurge?”

“What's that?” Koster asked her.

“A doorway to God,” she whispered.

“That's what it says. But Edison took it from Tesla, claiming provenance since Tesla was working for him at the time.”

“Edison stole it?”

“Appropriated it. What exactly did Tesla do, Savita? I know the name, but… Something with wireless electrical systems or something?”

“He was a Serbian inventor,” she said, “an electrical genius who had once worked for Edison on the Continent, and then came to America. When Tesla proposed a way to improve the efficiency of Edison's Direct Current dynamos, Edison said, ‘There’s fifty thousand dollars in it for you—if you can do it.' But when a year went by and Tesla finally succeeded, Edison simply quipped, ‘Tesla, you don't understand our American sense of humor.’ He cheated him. Refused to pay.

“The truth was, they were doomed to be rivals from the very beginning. Edison had put all of his energies and his investors' money into DC—Direct Current—while Tesla had conceived of an Alternating Current system. And personally, the two men were so different.”

“How so?”

“Edison was ungainly, a stooping and shuffling figure, who could care less about his appearance. Tesla, on the other hand, like Howard Hughes, was fastidious to the point of obsession. Edison disliked Tesla for being an egghead and cultured. Tesla was also a bit of a dandy, and enjoyed socializing with the cream of New York society. Even their scientific approaches were different. Tesla once said that if Edison had to find a needle in a haystack, he would proceed by examining each piece of straw in an elaborate elimination process, even though a little theory and calculation might save him ninety percent of the labor. One famous Edison quote states, ‘I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that don’t work.'”

“What happened to Tesla after their falling-out?”

“He couldn't get a job during the depression of '86. Edison had blacklisted him. For a while, he worked as a laborer on New York street gangs, earning just enough to get by. Then Westinghouse, who had invented the air brake for railroads, began to invest in AC-based power plants. Tesla's patent for an AC motor was just what Westinghouse needed, and soon the Serbian scientist was working for Westinghouse as a well-paid consultant. Edison was furious. He engineered a PR campaign, had his minions kidnap dogs and cats off the street, which he would then have electrocuted using AC. It was his way of trying to show the public how dangerous alternating current was. In the end, though, no matter what Edison did, Tesla's AC system was superior.”

Koster looked back at his notebook. He turned over a page and said, “Apparently, Tesla told Edison to reexamine the Edison effect. Edison states that the effect seemed to—and I quote—‘impress some of the bulge-headed fraternity of the Savanic World.’” Koster paused, raised an eyebrow. “What's the Edison effect?”

While experimenting with lightbulbs, Sajan explained, Edison noticed that, in addition to the electric current flowing through the filament, another charge passed through the vacuum—a stream of electrons, burning off of the plate. The Edison effect, as it came to be known, didn't seem to hold any commercial application, so Edison abandoned it.

“Of course,” she concluded, “later, radio pioneers like Tesla, deForest and Fleming found that if they ran some extra wires into a vacuum tube, it could perform three useful electronic functions: It could amplify a signal; it could rectify it—turning AC into DC; and it could switch it from on to off. This triode made radio a reality.”

“Which Tesla invented, not Marconi,” said Koster, trying to keep up with her.

“That's what the Supreme Court ruled, eight months after his death. Poor Tesla. But vacuum tubes were unreliable and expensive. It wasn't until William Shockley that this problem was solved.”

“How?”

“Solid-state,” Sajan said. “The transistor.”

Koster stared at her blankly.

She sighed. “Why do electrons flow so easily through copper and so poorly through glass? And what is it about silicon that makes it fall in between? The answer is based on the architecture of the atom. Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist, determined that electrons don't orbit in any old spot. Bohr defined precisely how far from the nucleus every orbit should be, and how many electrons can reside there at any given moment in time.”

“You're starting to sound like my mother, the physics teacher,” Koster said.

“Working from this theory,” Sajan continued, “you can tell which elements are highly conductive. Materials like silver and copper and gold are the best conductors
because they only have a single electron in their outermost orbit. The best insulators have eight. Semiconductors, like silicon, have just four. They're in between. And by doping semiconductors with various impurities, like arsenic or boron, you can influence their conductivity and resistance.”

Do I sound like this when I talk about architecture?
Koster wondered. No wonder Sajan was always telling him to move on. But he didn't have the heart to interrupt her soliloquy. Sajan seemed to be on some kind of adrenaline rush as she outlined the underlining principles of her industry. Koster bit his lip, nodding at the appropriate moments.

“When a semiconductor strip,” she went on, “is hooked up to some source of current, like a battery, electrons flow easily from the negative to the positive side. But they don't flow the other way. A device that lets current pass in only one direction is a rectifier.”

“Like Fleming's vacuum tube rectifier,” Koster offered.

Sajan nodded. “Exactly. William Shockley and others developed a semiconductor triode by making a semiconductor sandwich with three different regions, analogous to the three electrodes in deForest's vacuum tube triode. In other words, all the standard electrical components—diodes and transistors, et cetera—can be made out of silicon, if the silicon is first doped with the proper impurities. Of course, linking all of these components proved extremely cumbersome. It wasn't until the fifties that Jack Kilby and other scientists realized you could perform all of the functions of a circuit using just one material—a monolithic slice of pure silicon.”

Koster couldn't stand it any longer. “Look,” he said. “I'm not an electrical engineer. Can't you just cut to the chase? What's this got to do with the Edison schematic?”

“The
Tesla
schematic, you mean.”

“Whatever.”

“You know,” Sajan mused with a smile, “in filing for certain patents in my career, I've often been surprised to find Tesla's name, over and over again, as if he somehow anticipated all these developments. His 1903 patents 723,188 and 725,605, for example, contain the basic principles of the AND circuit element, based on Boolean logic—more than a half century before Shockley conceived it. In 1917, he anticipated the main features of modern radar—twenty years before Emil Girardeau built and installed the first radar systems. He even invented a so-called death ray based on the charged particle beam.”

“Savita!” cried Koster. “Are you doing this on purpose? Is this a poke at my… you know, my condition?”

“I don't think you have Asperger syndrome, or any other condition,” she said. “I think you just use your knowledge, all that trivia in your head, as a shield, Joseph, to shelter yourself from the moment. Like your counting.”

“Just answer the question, Savita,” he insisted. “What does all this have to do with Tesla's schematic?”

“Building a circuit is like building a sentence. There are certain standard components—resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors.” Sajan took the notebook from Koster. She opened it, revealing the Tesla schematic. Then, without warning, she ripped it right out of the pad.

“What are you doing?” cried Koster.

Sajan held out her other hand. “Where is it?” she said.

“Where's what?”

“The printout of the file of the first three schematics, the one you saved back to your camera. Back in Paris, remember?”

“What printout?”

“Don't lie to me, Joseph. I'm sure you made one.”

Koster lifted an eyebrow. Then, he reached into his
jacket, as if drawing a weapon. He pulled out a folded piece of paper, which Sajan immediately snatched from his hand. She unfolded it, spread it out on the table. A moment later, she placed the sheet of paper from Koster's notebook beside it, the page featuring Tesla's schematic. She brought them together. They fit perfectly.

“You were right, Joseph. Back in Paris, I mean. When you put all the pieces together, what's left is no map. It's a blueprint for a kind of electrical circuit. A microchip, Joseph, at the heart of a larger machine.”

“A microchip, based on something two thousand years old? How's that possible?”

“I don't know.”

“And how did da Vinci and Franklin know what to add to that first illustration, the one from the Gospel of Judas? And Tesla. It doesn't make any sense. How did they get this mysterious knowledge, Savita? Where did it come from—a dream, from the sky?”

“I don't know, Joseph. But these circles and squares,” she said, pointing down at the drawing, “these rectangles and this pattern of lines. They represent electrical components. Series of capacitors and diodes, resistors, transistors.”

“It's not a map to the Gospel of Judas?”